There is a sketch in Portlandia in which Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein sit down for a meal and fire off a line of questions to a docile server about the origins of their chicken. Where is the farm? What does it eat? Who are the ‘they’ that are raising these chickens? His name was Colin, the server responds, who grew up on sheeps milk and locally grown hazelnut and had four acres to roam on. When the server can’t speak to whether or not Colin and his chicken friends played and hugged each other with their little wings, the pair asks the server to hold their table so they can go visit the farm for themselves first. “We are doing the right thing,” they say to one another.
As time goes on, it is harder for me to understand the parody: that they are asking so many questions or that they have to.
On Sunday afternoon I returned to a professional kitchen for the first time since February of last year. In 2012 I launched MASA, a California Mexican-inspired project (please don’t call it tex-mex!) that began serving multi-course meals for twelve in a friend’s living room. Initially, we charged ‘a la gorra’, meaning diners were asked to decide the value of the experience. The idea was to create a meal that paralleled a food scene that was moving towards more global-flavors but was locked into a handful of exclusive neighborhoods. That was short-lived; while locals were often overly generous, tourists from the United States and Europe underpaid so egregiously for their four-course “third-world experience” that I briefly considered a ‘gringo quota’ before deciding to charge a fixed amount to everyone and abandon the closed-door project all together. My idealism (and hope for human decency) continued in other ways.
In 2016, I moved into a pop-up model. At its peak, I was organizing about 10 events a month in restaurants all across the city with the mission to help decentralize new food culture. Somewhere around 2019, I stopped selling beef and dairy products and came up with a strict menu system where more than half of the dishes had to be vegan or vegetarian. That questioning of my responsibility as a person who feeds people is largely what led to this fanzine, and likewise, this fanzine is compelling me to fill my menus with as much agro ecological and organic product purchased directly from producers as possible.
On Sunday, I returned to cooking beef on the condition that it be produced within a regenerative farm model and that we only used less popular cuts or ones that butchers end up throwing away—like marrowbone, head meat or brain. Fish was sourced from independent fishermen that delivered the day of the catch and some of the vegetarian dishes were decided two days before depending on what an agroecological vegetable vendor brought me.
This all sounds romantic: building direct relationships with producers and knowing all the details of where the food I am selling comes from. In reality, this was a privilege of time, money and social capital in the form of professional contacts. To source beef, I reached out to six farmers and butchers which means six price and product lists to analyze, six conversations about delivery times and costs, minimum purchases and the minute details of how it would be prepared and packaged.
Vegetable sourcing should be easier. Argentina is the second largest producer of organic products in the world, produce included amongst olive oils, honey, meat, sugar and milk. Yet, most of this is exported; between 85 and 90%. Most of this, 160 thousands tons a year, goes to Europe and the United States. Bilateral deals and a two century old agroexport model make it so that I have virtually no access to the 200,000 acres of organic products farmed in the same region that I live in. Certified organic makes up just 2.2% of cultivated land. The country's most fertile lands are mostly used for raw materials; 60% of cultivated land is used to grow soybeans that is later turned into oil or animal feed for export.
I went through eight different vendors. Three didn’t respond, two told me my order was too small, one was out of my budget and another could only confirm the day before the event. Last minute, I landed on one that provided roughly 20% of the produce. The rest came from a neighborhood vegetable stand who had no idea where any of their produce comes from.
All of this research, which is hardly close to being finished, is unquantifiable. I do know it took me 8 hours to physically purchase everything, 9 hours to produce everything for a 5 hour service followed with an hour of on-site prep and another of clean up. Three days of work. MASA is mostly sustained by my writing, which I have the privilege of charging in dollars so that I can work locally for pesos and still pay my rent. I do not judge those who aren’t willing or able to invest time and resources into better consumption. It shouldn’t be that way.
Later I found out that the cod we were selling is an endangered species. I was so sold on supporting the economy of a local fishing community catching native fish that it didn’t enter my mind that overfishing the species was the trade-off. It feels increasingly more impossible to consume ethically and more and more questions are required to get close to just consumption. I suppose I could go full vegan but I am not convinced that abstaining from non-industrial meat production is the greatest agriculture model to regenerate soil nor do I think that cooking for vegans is the way to get meat eaters to question their food consumption—which is my ultimate goal.
I think back to an interview that Alicia Kennedy did with Carla Martin, the Founder and Director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute. “It shouldn't be the responsibility of people going to the grocery store to really dig in on the labeling and figure out where their food is coming from. The food should just be well produced and there shouldn't be all these ethical landmines everywhere in the grocery store for people...basically you’re set up to more or less fail. What would be the ideal is basically, if you go into a store and you buy food, you should be able to be assured, just in buying it, that it was somehow good for people, the environment, the economy, etc. That is not guaranteed in any way.”
I know that my case is an extreme one. I am a (mostly) one-man show producing small, bi-weekly events. In a restaurant, I suppose, it would be slightly easier with a big emphasis on slightly. I spoke with Nicólas Tykocki, a cook that just left work at a large restaurant group to start the process of opening his first restaurant, Ácido, which will have an emphasis on sustainable, seasonal, national ingredients and natural wines.
“The amount of time I lose looking for ingredients is absurd. It’s totally unproductive,” Tykocki says, “My fantasy is that we start subsidizing agroecological vegetables and grains, or maybe before that, placing a tax on meat to encourage more vegetable consumption. One of the reasons that I want to open my own restaurant is to do my small part to show what we can eat every single day with food produced in this country. Potato, onion, oranges, these are not products that are native to here. There is a massive range of foods that we can produce here, it is unquantifiable [sic] that we don’t produce in order to plant soy and corn.”
Tykocki, of course, is pointing out the ways in which consumers and economic models cross over one another. If we are to change an agroexport economic model built on the foundations of extractivism, sold abroad to pump the country with foreign currency and line the pockets of few, we need to change the social construction that sustains it. The answer is both better legislation of the ag industry and changing the way we perceive consumption, which means consuming less and paying the same and in many cases more.
“This all has to do with the way we consume and our vision of instant consumption. That is our great error,” says Raquel Tejerina, co-owner of Catalino, a restaurant run out of a private residence in Buenos Aires. “If you want bananas all year around, you can get bananas around the corner at your local vegetable stand. If you want bananas that are from here, that are a more responsible consumption, you wouldn’t get them year around. That just means that we don’t need to eat bananas every day of the year.”
Tejerina sources agroecological ingredients from 180 farmers from all over the country. Her sister, Mariana, is tasked with taking whatever ingredients are sent to her kitchen and creating a constantly changing menu. This, obviously, requires more creativity and less choice; both run counter to the ways of conventional consumption. Working this way and investing in agroecology is their drop in the bucket towards their ultimate goal: national food sovereignty.
“To me this is a question of our perception of consumption and status. If we were to make a healthy lifestyle trendy, make it cool to eat beaten up tomatoes of every color, everyone would want to buy that, the rich and the poor. That’s what they did in Peru with quinoa which is a national product that you can find now in high end restaurants and street stalls,” argues Tejerina. “I don’t think this is necessarily an issue of economic differences between classes because if that were the case people wouldn’t buy coca cola which is expensive. There are plenty of studies that suggest that people with the least resources will purchase expensive products because it makes them feel like they are a part of something. We need a national campaign to change the way we view our consumption. What are we consuming, from who, whose work are we supporting, whose work are we not supporting. From there people will make their own decisions but the first step is getting people to ask questions.”
How we begin to get the masses to ask questions of itself is deeply layered. Industries are built so we don’t ask anything about them at all. And asking questions about our food consumption cannot exist in a vacuum; we must also ask questions about a model that doesn’t allow time to purchase locally or cook healthily, creatively and from scratch. In the immediate, it means switching our perception from satiation to investment; not fulfilling an immediate desire but investing in the future with the people and independent businesses that are founded on the morals we want the world to begin to build a new base atop of.